Featured Artist Elizabeth Turrell :  War and Piecework June 2008                 Turrell uses the medium of enamel in different ways to address her duel interests in the personal and political. One theme is an intimate celebration of the stitch. For generations of women, sewing and basic stitching have been quotidian tasks as well as intimate, portable, and often subversive means of expression. Turrell has always loved “white work,” especially mended and darned cloth, and she honors this labour in a series of monochromatic “samplers” of all white enamel on “sewn” copper foil.                      Conversely, Turrell’s overtly topical, political commentaries are produced on pre-enamelled industrial steel, using layered liquid enamels in a painterly application. With names like Friendly Fire and In Memoriam she explores “the broad theme of conflict as seen almost daily on the small rectangle of the television screen or newspaper photograph”. She conveys her revulsion with the “horrifying, but often removed and sanitized” news reports to which modern viewers may have become inured through repetition. She notes that “these news items often come with the ‘warning’ that the viewer may find them disturbing”. Tally of a War, a large, potent, but still intimate enamel on steel (34x 25cm), counts the war dead; it is cross-hatched, layered, and drawn, like a pen and ink drawing or graffiti scratched in a cell wall, with irregular circles X-ed out. Many, many circles, and many, many S’s count up the anonymous victims of war. Just as nothing is untouched in war, there is no space unmarked in the composition. On the surface these pieces refer to the Gulf War, but they may have their impetus is the crucible of Turrell’s childhood experience of World War II with her family in England, a theme to which she refers in an oblique way in her explicitly domestic fabrications. From a review by Marjorie Simon, a metalsmith and writer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Elizabeth Turrell was formerly Senior Research Fellow in Enamel, Centre for Fine Print Research, UWE                 Simple repetition of form is powerfully employed in work by ElizabethTurrell. "Markers of Conflict" is comprised of a series of closely placed X forms covering a wall from below the waist to over one's head. Larger than a badge or brooch, too small to be a sign for conveying information to the public at large, these works are of the size and gesture to have been furtively marked on a door in the dead of night. Enameled surfaces pocked with gold, red, and glossy white illustrate physical wear and fatigue, with repeated perforations, scraps of text, and an obsessive marking that feels like tallying. Their individual characteristics prevent them from being consumed as mementos. Experienced simultaneously they bear witness to events too unbearably commonplace to comprehend, man's inhumanity to man. From 'Enamel - beyond the Object' catalogue essay by Kim Cridler, Arts/Industry Coordinator for the John Michael Kohler Art Centre, Exhibition at 'Spaces', Cleveland Ohio, June-August 2005 Previous Featured Artists: Nicola Donovan Anna Farthing & Paul Gough Anthony Boswell Elizabeth Turrell Gail Ritchie back